Jon Kaweblum founded Klipped Kippahs because he faced a problem that needed a creative solution. The problem? He needed to create a yarmulke that stayed on a person’s head without an external clip. After some thought and development, he invented a kippah with a built-in clip, and the company was born.
Before Klipped Kippahs, Jon Kaweblum was the coach of a basketball team. Specifically, he coached a basketball team composed of Jewish boys who wore yarmulkes to games. Usually, the state of Florida would allow him and his team to play with clips on their yarmulkes. However, one year, the state suddenly said no, citing the possible risk of the clip puncturing the opponent. Besides, they weren’t part of the standard uniform in the first place.
So, Jon Kaweblum came up with Klipped Kippahs out of necessity. With his invention, his players could now give their all on the court without breaking any rules and “making it convenient for everyone else. After receiving a US patent, the company shot to the races right away.
Currently, Jon Kaweblum and Klipped Kippahs are now offering diverse options to people who want to wear their yarmulkes. They devised ways to enable people to design and make the sort of yarmulke they want, which covered changing the material and pattern of the kippah.
Jon Kaweblum also started up an online Klipped Kippahs store to make it easier for the public to buy their products.
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The first lesson I learned is that there is a big difference between a good idea and a successful business. Jon Kaweblum, founder of Klipped Kippahs
Jerome Knyszewski: Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?
Jon Kaweblum: I didn’t initially start out as an e-commerce business per say, I came up with a product and then I started to sell it online. My business model wasn’t designed to be on the web at first, but it became part of the strategy after the fact. A lot of our products are custom, so seven years ago before third-party platforms for customization were easily accessible, we built a system from the ground up where users could design yarmulkes and see what their creations would look like directly on the site. At the time, there was nothing else like it in our industry. Our customers were able to go online and satisfy 85% of their needs straight from the website which was pretty cool to see that work. Now it is somewhat expected in the custom e-commerce realm for consumers to be able to come onto your website and be able to create their designs.
Jerome Knyszewski: What was the “Aha Moment” that led to the idea for your current company? Can you share that story with us?
Jon Kaweblum: I’m an architect by training and also a big basketball junkie in my free time. When I was in architectural school, I was coaching a boys varsity basketball team in for a Jewish Orthodox school in Boca Raton and they would play with their yarmulkes on. Eventually I also became the athletic director of the school, and every year we had to apply for a certain letter from the state that allowed to boys to wear their yarmulkes during the games. One year, our application letter got rejected and their reasoning was that the yarmulke clips could be dangerous during the sport. I had seen wig clips before, and I thought of this idea to sew wig clips into yarmulkes. I ended up creating a sample and gave it to the boys to use during practice. The boys liked it, so I decided to send samples to the Florida High School Athletic Association in Tallahassee. Once the state approved the concept, we took 25 of those samples and sent them to Jewish schools all over the country. And just like that, I was in the yarmulke business. I even bought a “How to Apply for Your First Patent” book, it was definitely an aha time for me.
Jerome Knyszewski: Can you tell us a story about the hard times that you faced when you first started your journey? Did you ever consider giving up? Where did you get the drive to continue even though things were so hard?
Jon Kaweblum: The first lesson I learned is that there is a big difference between a good idea and a successful business. It’s a really underrated difference, and a lot of times without a lot of money it can be hard to be able to give a business the fuel it needs to try new things and grow. I was a student in college with a family when I started out, so I didn’t have the capital to start operating a business. I literally started Klipped Kippahs with $1,000 and credit cards. It was hard in the beginning to be able to pay for the expenses needed to operate or hire any employees.
On the web side, I’ve always had trouble with having programmers design the vision I have for my site. Both times I’ve done it, it’s been a terrible process because committing to a scope on a piece of paper with exactly what you have in your mind. I am also a graphic designer by training, especially one time when I literally created slides for how I wanted every single page of my website to look and I still had issues with getting my vision across to programmers. Getting the tech to match what I wanted was always very hard.
This year we took on our e-commerce solutions ourselves, building our own Shopify site using third party apps for customization. By being completely in-house we have full control over any changes we want to make. Early on, a big milestone was when we got our first patent and licensing with pro baseball and pro basketball. The novelty with coming up with this new idea and obtaining these licenses quickly wore off and I remember that I am doing this to support my family. That’s the north star, it’s not about what’s cool and gimmicky or having an ego, at the end of the day, I want to create a business that is viable and profitable to support my family.
Jerome Knyszewski: So, how are things going today? How did your grit and resilience lead to your eventual success?
Jon Kaweblum: I would say success is always a work in progress. But I think we are definitely on the right path. Having good mentors and joining business programs like EO, was really life changing for me. I have the opportunity to hear other entrepreneur’s experiences who face the same types of challenges that I do and what they have learned. Being given the knowledge about the difference between what makes a good business versus a bad one has really been game changing in my career.
That’s the north star, it’s not about what’s cool and gimmicky or having an ego, at the end of the day, I want to create a business that is viable and profitable to support my family.
Jerome Knyszewski: Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lessons or ‘takeaways’ you learned from that?
Jon Kaweblum: It is funny looking back at all the mistakes we have previously made with the knowledge we have now, but they certainly didn’t feel funny at the time. When we first got our patent, we came up with a product that used our patent to make wearable logos to clip that you could clip to your hair or your shirt or wherever else. I still think it could have gone a lot farther, but at the time we launched it as vendors in the promotional products industry and spent an entire year traveling to trade shows trying to get into that world. We just didn’t research the strategy properly and just jumped into it. There’s a big difference between a good idea and a good strategy. The good idea was there but the strategy wasn’t, so we lost money and it never happened because of it.
Jerome Knyszewski: Can you share a few examples of tools or software that you think can dramatically empower emerging eCommerce brands to be more effective and more successful?
Jon Kaweblum: Shopify is becoming very powerful and out of the box as well as open third-party channels makes it an amazing tool. We also use a really cool email company called Front that makes virtual collaborating really easy. I highly recommend investing in and taking advantage of tools that make the e-commerce process more seamless.
Jerome Knyszewski: As you know, “conversion” means to convert a visit into a sale. In your experience what are the best strategies an eCommerce business should use to increase conversion rates?
Jon Kaweblum: Honestly, that is something that we struggle with but are working towards perfecting. There are many factors that come into play for conversions. Having a user-friendly site is an important one. If your website takes too long to load, especially in a competitive market, odds are that the user will just go and look someplace else.
Figuring out the variables that play a role is definitely company and industry specific. A lot of trial and error needs to go into identifying that lever.
Jerome Knyszewski: Of course, the main way to increase conversion rates is to create a trusted and beloved brand. Can you share a few ways that an eCommerce business can earn a reputation as a trusted and beloved brand?
Jon Kaweblum: Delivering on what you promised is the number one way. Your word means everything and if you cannot stick to it, your customers are not likely to recommend you or use you again. Having some type of platform or way for word of mouth to spread, whether it be social media or ratings is a great way to build that trust. People come to you with certain expectations and they spend their money with you because they know what they can expect.
Delivering on what you promised is the number one way. Your word means everything and if you cannot stick to it, your customers are not likely to recommend you or use you again. Jon Kaweblum
Jerome Knyszewski: Ok super. Here is the main question of our interview. Based on your experience and success, what are the five most important things one should know in order to create a very successful e-commerce business? Please share a story or an example for each.
Jon Kaweblum: Have a very clear idea of who your market is. You can’t sell everything to everyone, so a clear idea of who you’re trying to sell to. We made the mistake of just starting to sell and saw that it didn’t play out how we hoped. Had we had a targeted person it would have saved a lot of money, effort and energy. We try to clearly define our demographic by embodying who we are trying to sell to such as putting up picture up in the office. He or she could be 35–45 years old, likes to do such and such in his or her free time, he or she has a child this age, this is where they live etc.
Having core values and a core mission set is really important. A business owner can’t do everything. The whole point of a company is to have a team of people making decisions on your behalf because as you grow there is no way to be a part of every decision. The only way to have dozens, hundreds or even thousands of people making decisions the same way you would, is to have core values. This is usually the essence of the owner, what characteristics he has used to get to this point. The core values need to be very clear to the whole company, from the janitor to the high executives. One of our core values is to keep upgrading. I like to keep finding new ways to make stuff better. On the same note, everyone in your company should have a clear idea of the core mission to make decisions based around it. If opportunities or situations come around that do not fit into your core mission, you have to have the discipline to not take them.
Having a group of people who can hold you accountable and that you can open up about real world problems you are facing in your business issues is huge. People always say, “how’s business?” and people always say, “oh it’s great, things are good”. Most of the time that’s not true. Confidants that you can really open up to makes you realize most of the time that your struggles are not unique. For me, joining EO gave me an outlet for that.
A 3-year or 10-year plan where you can clearly see where you’re driving towards. In terms of where you want to get to, having a clear goal for your team to know and share in is an important part of building trust in an organization. Whatever that is, whether it’s taking 10% of the market in five years or building a machine that is going to sell X number of parts, a big but attainable goal that everyone can get behind should be clearly defined.
Going off of the above point, having measurable and definable data where you can know if you are performing according to your mission is really important. Measuring that each one of your employees is performing correctly should be based on some KPIs as opposed to just “I feel like I had a good day”.
Jerome Knyszewski: How can our readers further follow you online?
Jon Kaweblum: You can follow Klipped Kippahs on Instagram and Facebook.
Jerome Knyszewski: This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for the time you spent with this!
